


Apologia -- Part One

by BlackbirdWrites



Series: Apologia -- GENTLEMAN JACK [1]
Category: Gentleman Jack (TV)
Genre: Anne Lister at sixteen, Anne Lister discovers Plato's erotica, Anne Lister trapped in Manor School attic, F/F, First I'm hearing about homosexuals being around for thousands of years, Greek Lessons, Where a dream began in a nightmare, ennui
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 23:19:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19328140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackbirdWrites/pseuds/BlackbirdWrites
Summary: Imprisoned in the Manor School's attic, Anne is sixteen and searching for answers about her sexuality. "Plato's Symposium" reveals to her for the first time in her life that she is homosexual and THEY'VE been living and loving for thousands of years.  Eros, erotica, and the search for a lover to complete her life begins.  Her self-discovery is quickly followed by pressing emotional questions and then an image appears that continues to haunt her --just outside her field of vision.





	Apologia -- Part One

**”Apologia --Part One --The Attic”**

I do enjoy a good guessing game as much as the next well-informed person and yet, in the twenty plus years since leaving the confinement of "The Attic" at York's so-called Manor School my enmity is toward its depraved masters for how they treated me while I was their captive. 

What other horrors did the elders have on the ready "to break me?" Was wrecking my mind through physical isolation not enough for their sadism? In the end, if they had succeeded in reducing me into a drooling fool, would they've called a carriage and turned me back over to my parents? Perhaps, with a note pinned on my shoulder, "We've tried everything. Please accept your daughter back." Signed: The Manor School. 

But that would've been pointless, and perhaps the chief sadist amongst them knew it. My parents, who, in their most courteous and most polite way possible had likely revealed upon signing me up —and without any argument arising from me —that where my dear mother's nerves were concerned, she could hardly take much more. I shouldered it because I loved my mother. I became the reason given why the sherry bottles in our house were always in need of refilling. Why the heavy drapes were often drawn during the day. Why it was rare that anyone, other than our closest family, ever came to call. 

That was my fault, too. 

So the scheme, as transparent as it was to get me out of the house and away from my nerve-addled mother, was successful to the degree that I took up residence at the nearby Manor School, but soon found myself less of a student and more of a prisoner locked in an attic. I could have books to go with the lessons I attended during the day alongside the other students, and then it was back up the cobwebbed stairs to the attic for the night. 

It wasn't too long before I tested the limits and asked for a sack of pebbles for my homemade slingshot to better dispatch the scurrying mice. At least it would give me something to do during the long hours after I'd finished reading. 

It was hell, and I hated it but I managed to survive up there. 

While the attic was making me stronger I watched as another girl, Eliza, they'd sent up there for punishment, became unhinged to a severe degree. From her and from that creepy attic, I learned a valuable key to surviving in this world. Survival is at its core a strategic patient practice. It does not come by chance, not for me anyway, but it does come with some control. 

The attic became a chapter in my life, an episode that changed me.

Dutifully, I read all the books assigned to my studies in Latin and Greek. When I asked for "Plato's Symposium," no one was the wiser much less cared about my interests, and so it was Plato's playwright, Aristophanes, who gave me the answers to my homosexual identity. I was so grateful I wept. Finally, someone was speaking to me in a language that made sense, even if he lived fourteen hundred years ago and was long since dead. 

Reading Aristophanes' thoughts when I was sixteen, I remember thinking how everything inside me already was in a maddening search for everything else, duality included. It irritated me that no one had bothered to tell me that homosexuality was thousands of years old and there'd been plenty of women like me who'd lived before. 

And yes, I confess. The entirety of my momentous self-discovery happened through the pages of a book I was reading while trapped in an attic with Eliza threatening periodically to hang herself. 

The reveal of Plato's duality had its own queer dramatic tension and I felt drawn into them while reading and learning so much for the first time. What I understood better that day than the day before, was that intricate to duality —ergo: intertwined in myself —was the compelling motivator for wholeness: Human Connection. 

I will find the answers to this in my lifetime. I see it so clearly that if I had the talent to sketch with a pencil, I could finish a hand-drawing of my would-be lover's face in less than twenty minutes. Naturally, I've timed myself. 

But on the days when ennui overtakes me, I physically ache for the parts of myself that are missing. 

She has to be real. It would be far too cruel a trick to play on myself to close my eyes and feel us wanting each other this way.

I have the urge to put my ink pen down and instead search my desk drawer for a pencil. How can I miss what I don't know, but feel so near? if I worked at drawing for twenty minutes, I'm sure I could reveal her face. 

 

_______


End file.
